The Sun Never Sets on a Melting Pot: What are the odds?

I love cemeteries! Any cemetery will do, but mostly the old ones. My mother calls them open air museums. And she should know, as she served for several years as the Commissioner of Cemeteries for the State of Rhode Island. She even made the New York Times! https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/us/29land.html

So on a recent visit to my home state of Massachusetts, my husband and I made a point of visiting Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts. Mount Auburn is significant because it was the first designed garden cemetery in the United States, different from a church graveyard. It is also significant as the final resting place of historical figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edwin Land, Julia Ward Howe, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Robert Gould Shaw, Winslow Homer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fannie Farmer, Williamina Stevens Fleming, Nathaniel Bowditch, Charles Sumner, Charles Bulfinch, Dorothea Dix and Doc Edgerton, to name a few. (If you don’t know who these folks are, it would be worth your while to learn).

The view from the Longfellow family plot.

Nathaniel Bowditch, considered the father of modern maritime navigation.

The Boston skyline from one of the hills at Mount Auburn.

Commemorative monument to Union soldiers who lost their lives in the Civil War.

Mount Auburn is a beautiful spot, covered in trees and shrubs and laid out in a leisurely manner that invites wandering. After Mount Auburn, we decided to visit another cemetery on the way back to my brother’s in Belmont, a suburb of Boston, appropriately named Belmont Cemetery. We had no particular connection to the cemetery other than it was on the way back. There were a few findagrave photo requests that I could search for.

When I get to a cemetery like that, I like to find the oldest section. There in Belmont, I found the surname Trenholm, which I recognized from my husband’s family tree, with burials that dated back to 1858. His Trenholms came from Yorkshire, England to Nova Scotia. Further descendants migrated west to Ontario and then into Michigan. But why not? So I photographed all the Trenholms I found.

While posting the photos to findagrave, I also checked to see if the family was on familysearch, and indeed it was, but only partly. Some folks were missing, and there were duplicates as well. While I was putting it all together, I decided to check to see if there was a relationship between these Massachusetts Trenholms and my husband’s family. Indeed there is - George Willard Trenholm, the father of the family buried in Belmont, was a sister to Mary Trenholm, who married Thomas Keillor Jr. Apparently this branch of the family migrated from Nova Scotia to Boston.

What are the odds? There is nothing coincidental in family history.